One-Album Wonder

The first honest-to-god CD I ever bought for myself, via my finanicial proxy at the time (my parents), was Eiffel 65’s Europop. You’ll probably recall Eiffel 65 for their pandemically catch song “Blue”. Now, here’s the part where I provide a link to a YouTube video or the band’s MySpace so that you can hear the song, remind yourself of it, and remember the agony of being unable to get it out of your head.

Well, the first part I can’t do. The official music video for the song is absolutely atrocious: it has computer generated animation of about — allow me to step out of the way-back machine — ReBoot, but with art direction from Blinky the Three-Eyed Fish. (Alternatively, perhaps it was an attempt to apply the infinite monkey theorem to music videos.)

At any rate, I it’s… yeah. And there are a few fan-made ones where the video consists of Macromedia Flash animated stick figures, clips from Halo, or clips from Sailor Moon. What I’m saying is that if you want to hear this song again, you’re going to have to avert your eyes.

Wait, but what about the MySpace? Well, as it happens, one of the three members of Eiffel 65 decided to go it solo, and the other two abandoned the name and adopted a new one (Bloom 06), whose MySpace has no Eiffel 65 tracks. See, apparantly the name “Eiffel 65” is the property of the corporation that sponsored the band. I guess that’s how things work in Italy.

And that’s really the trick to all of this. The band and its three members are all Italian. They actually made a couple more albums, in Italian, but none of them have quite had the same feel of Europop.

This kind of leaves me in a bind, because the next bit was where I was going to write about how the whole album was good and deserved more attention than it got. However, the juxtaposition of this with a general panning of the band’s body of work strikes me as… unkind.

But there you have it, I suppose. Europop is synth-pop at its finest, but also tries to put some weight behind its words, instead of discussing non-specific life turmoil. Between a song about the PlayStation and a song about how if you want to change things you have to actually work for it, there’s a lot to like there.

So this brings me to ponder a chicken-and-techno problem: did I buy the album because I liked it, or did I come to like it because I had bought it? Well, I’d certainly like to say the former. I’ve definitely developed quite a propensity for the strong-beated musical stylings of the synthesizer and sampler.

But, deep down, it was really about being more like the cool kid who lived up the street. See, he owned the album.

Afterthought: he also had a lava lamp, but I’ve managed to resist that particular, er, siren song.